I'd say it was farce, but torture can never be anything but tragedy...

digby on idiot metrics in the WOT:

Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they [Rumsfeld et al] decided that they would guage success or failure --- certainly they would report to the White House success or failure --- based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, 'look at how much intelligence we're getting. We're really getting somewhere.'

What amazes me is that people still behave as though all the torture that resulted from this focus on the numbers was unanticipated by those at the top. It may well have been, but anyone who has ever read even the tiniest bit of history knows that the arrest and torture and sometimes death of innocents has always been the result of such a numbers game.